How do you work with the sales and success teams, in conjunction with the product team, on the roadmap? What pieces of the puzzle do you own, versus your sales and success team?

A PMM’s success is largely due to how tightly they partner with sales and product.
A successful product marketer champions and owns customer voice. Your role is to synthesize all the insights across research and customer feedback to inform sales strategy and product roadmap. You also drive the go-to-market for new product launches which includes defining the target audience, positioning, messaging and the marketing campaign. Target audience, positioning and value props should be defined early in the process as it will largely shape the Product requirements which usually has longer lead time. That will eventually inform how Sales speaks to customers and tools the team needs to overcome objections.  

In addition, you will own the strategy and creation of sales enablement (case studies, webinars, blog, etc.) along with marketing campaign across paid (search, social, affiliates) or organic (PR, SEO). You will also put yourself in the shoes of the customer to ensure a seamless end-to-end experience. Nothing is ever perfect right out the gate and it’s important to pre-emptively troubleshoot areas where there could be friction by ensuring the messaging is right and creating appropriate content, tools or internal processes to mitigate any areas where customers may experience confusion.

Finally, you will define and create the tracking mechanisms to measure success. This is often done in collaboration with sales and product depending on the metrics and where that data lives. However, you and/or in conjunction with product, will be responsible for reporting on the results of product launch often along with implications to business, sales strategy or future product roadmap.

PMMs can provide a scaling function for sales and success teams. Usually sales and success teams will offer inputs based on their experience with their territory, accounts or regions. PMM can help ask the right questions that can get to the root of buyer needs, synthesize feedback across sales/success teams, spot patterns and help PM teams make decisions in a more holistic way.

While the working relationship between product marketing and sales and success may depend on how the organization is structured, these teams provide crucial insights into customer needs regardless of where they sit.

At Square PMMs are embedded in product teams and sales and success sit in different parts of the org. PMMs are responsible for representing the voice of the customer in product development and sales and success teams provide critical inputs into that voice. It’s really helpful to have an established, measurable feedback loop with those teams to understand how certain feedback is impacting customers and business results, for example what is impacting win/loss with sales? What are the top inquiry drivers from success teams?

PMMs are responsible for collecting customer inputs across sales, success, and several other teams, synthesizing those inputs into actionable recommendations, and partnering with the rest of the product team (PM, Eng, Design, Data Science, Research) to prioritize based on a holistic plan to both create customer impact and drive business goals.